Today, nearly all critical infrastructures depend on a reliable energy supply, particularly power supply. In case of power failures, these infrastructures and facilities such as water and gas supply, control centers, hospitals, telecommunication devices or computer centers are further operational by an emergency power supply only. For longer-term power failures, the functionality of the emergency power supply depends on the battery capacity, the performance of the fuel supply or the respective fuel reserve. Usually, the capacities or tank reserves are sufficient for an operation between three hours (for instance base stations of mobile networks) up to maximum 24 hours in hospitals. Only a few computer centers have reserves for 72 hours operation. For maintaining the emergency power supply, therefore, in case of longer-term power failure the replenishment of fuel is essential. Mobile emergency power systems, which can be provided in large numbers for instance by the Technische Hilfswerk (THW, the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief), depend on a functioning fuel supply. Moreover, today very few organizations have their own safe fuel supply. Even the police, the fire department and the THW are dependent on the fuel supply by public fueling stations. In the case of large-area power failures, even fueling stations are not at disposal anymore for fuel supply, since usually they do not have any emergency power supply. Thus, the fuel cannot be pumped from the tanks into vehicles or emergency power systems. Further, there is no possibility at present to simply connect emergency power systems to the fueling stations and to operate them thereby, since fueling stations are not so equipped.
For the delivery of fuel to emergency power systems and fueling stations, the fuel must be available in fuel depots and it must be possible to deliver it. For this purpose, it must be possible that the carriers are informed about the need and that the operation of their vehicles is coordinated. For filling fuel into the tanker trucks, functioning fuel depots are required. The situation gets worse by that in the case of a large-area power failure, all emergency power systems will start at the same time and then have to be refueled also at approximately the same time. This leads to an aggravation of the situation and places enormous demands on the logistics concept. Corresponding necessities result in an analogous manner for other forms of energy, too, as for instance compressed gases (propane, butane, hydrogen), liquid hydrogen, electrical energy storage devices (accumulators), but also cooling energy storage devices (for instance nitrogen, helium, hydrogen in liquid form).